What’s kind of awesome about saying “cyberpunk” is no matter what it is- someone will pop up and say “it’s not cyberpunk”. I remember r/cyberpunk had a thing where something was not cyberpunk because it had denim- and only black clothing was cyberpunk😂 When I posted this a few months ago:

Still had people whining it was not cyberpunk- even after Gibson dropped by to tweet it was😊

After that I don’t think I can agree at all. But in this specific case, used industrial assembly robots for sale probably pre-date any of the canon fiction which “defined” the genre.

Industrial robots first appeared in the early 1960s, which suggests that second-hand industrial robots appeared shortly afterwards (but not immediately; the early models were likely too specialised and temperamental to see much resale action).

Dating the birth of cyberpunk is massively subjective, but it goes back at least as far as John Brunner’s and PK Dick’s work in the 60’s and 70’s.

However: so what?

Why the hell would a machine need to have been constructed after a book was written in order to be suggestive of the aesthetic of that book? The cyberpunk aesthetic wasn’t pulled out of thin air; it was constructed as an extrapolation of things that the authors were aware of, because they already existed.

There’s been recursion since then (e.g. the use of biological metaphors for malware was probably at least partially due to Shockwave Rider), but the original influence was from tech to book, not the other way around.